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Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Breath of Life

The world would be free of trouble if there were no love! All the problems in the world is caused by love! So also all the joy, pleasure and the very purpose of life. Suppose there is no love, you can’t be jealous; jealousy is because of love. Greed is because you love objects too much. Anger is because you love perfection, that is why you are angry at imperfections. You love yourself too much and that’s why pride and arrogance comes to you. Isn’t it?

So, every distortion of love causes problems not only for us, but for everybody. Even though this is the case, without love what is there in life? Just imagine there’s nobody who loves you on this planet, and you don’t love anybody. Does life have any meaning, any purpose? It would appear absolutely depressing, boring, uninteresting. So how do we get to that point of love where it is free from the distortions and we are at ease with ourselves?

This is where a little knowledge about us, about our mind, our consciousness and the root of distortion will help. It is when you are tired and exhausted that you are not in touch with your virtues. Every individual is bestowed with all the virtues in the world, but they get covered by lack of understanding. All that is needed is to just to uncover the virtues that are already there.

When we are happy, something in us is expanding, have you noticed it? And when we are upset, something in us is being crushed; a sense of contraction is felt. Just knowing this brings freedom to us. Then our mind or our consciousness no more becomes a puppet of anybody’s words, opinions or their sayings. It becomes free. We are unconditionally happy.

So, learning something about our breath is very important. Our breath has a great lesson for us which we have forgotten. For every rhythm in the mind, there is a corresponding rhythm in the breath; for every rhythm in the breath, there is a corresponding emotion. So, when you cannot handle your mind directly, you can do it through breath.

Neither at school nor at home does anybody teach you what to do when you are upset or angry or depressed. Isn’t that so? The first thing we did when we came to this planet was that we took a deep breath in and then we started to cry. The last thing we will be doing will be to breathe out and make others cry! In between, the whole life, we are breathing in and out, but we have learnt very little about our breath! The rhythm in breath can help us get in touch with the depth of ourselves, our soul, our consciousness, our being and we feel connected with everybody, with everything in the world.

We need to learn a little bit about our breath. We need to know a little bit about all the layers of our existence, that is, body, breath, mind, intellect, memory, ego and the self. This is what I call Art of Living, learning a little bit about ourselves, the seven layers of our life. And that makes us be in the present moment and it helps us to maintain the innocence that we are all born with, and feel at home with everybody, anywhere.